Annakarinaland

2016-06-24

The Frameline Film Festival is in full swing through the end of Gay Pride month that culminates in the Pride Parade on June 26 in San Francisco. The LGBT event features narratives, shorts and documentaries from around the world, and prides itself on taking the best films out there from this world. It is an eclectic pageant with films about gay men, lesbians, transgenders and bisexuals.

There are 55 about lesbians this year, which mostly share a low budget profile, but for lesbians at the Frameline Audience, it doesn’t matter since the authentic voices of the community are more important than artistic content or cinematic innovation. What matters most is authentic representation and the films for this weekend have that stamp of quality.

The Bay area premiere of AWOL directed by Deb Shoval is based on an award winning short story- a film set in rural America about a chance meeting which goes beyond being a summer fling. An incongruent couple fill the narrative arc in a relationship between high school graduate Joey and Daisy Dukes, a woman with kids and a truck driver husband. The film screens June 25 at Landmark Theatres in Piedmont.

At the Roxie is a cinematic extravaganza "Ovarian Psycos" on June 25 and directors Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle will be in attendance. The film is a documentary about twenty plus young women of color who bike through the streets of East LA with black bandanas emblazoned with white Fallopian tubes over their faces - "The Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade". Their mission is to protest violence against women. The bikers echo the "Women's Army" in Lizzie Borden's cult classic "Born in Flames "(1983)shown at a previous Frameline Festival (2007). In a cameo role as a feminist newspaper editor is future Oscar winning filmmaker Kathyrn Bigelow. "The Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade" was founded by poet M.C. and activist Xela de la X and is composed of cisgender and transgender women who protest misogyny and racism and honor the legacy of the Chicanx civil rights movement.

The festival closes with Andrew Haigh "Looking" at the Castro at 7pm on June 26 -the last Pride event of this month. The series is set in San Francisco and featured for two seasons on HBO. As proof of its enduring popularity advance tickets are sold out but "Rush" tickets are available at the box office.